Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Why would climate denialists and Tea Partyers like paleontology?

The right’s dinosaur fetish: Why the Koch brothers are obsessed with paleontology

In April of 2014, the National Museum of Natural History in Washingtonclosed
the doors of its paleontology hall. Gone were the placoderm fish, the
Ice Age mammals, the hollow-boned pterodactyls. Gone especially were the
dinosaurs – the Apatosaurus, Tyrannosaurus and other kings of the primordial earth.
But
this was no second extinction. It was evolution, a $45 million
renovation project that would expand the paleontology halls to 25,000
square feet and give an outdated series of displays a desperately needed
update. $35 million of that cost – the largest single gift in the
museum’s history — was pledged by one David H. Koch.
Nobody
inspires more liberal anger than Charles and David Koch. As owners of
the massive Koch Industries, a multinational energy and manufacturing
conglomerate, the Koch brothers have spent a fortune bankrolling a
profusion of right-wing causes. They have gained a well-deserved
reputation as climate change deniers, polluters, union busters and
all-round rapacious capitalists. Trace most conservative campaigns back
far enough, and you’ll find them at the other end, pumping their
libertarian vision into the body politic.
That’s business,
however. Everybody needs hobbies, and one of David Koch’s biggest
hobbies, beyond his more general philanthropic pursuits, is
paleontology. He has toured museums all over the world, visited dig
sites in Central Africa, and funded the excavations of Don Johansen, the
discoverer of the famous prehuman fossil Lucy.In an
interview with the magazine Archeology, Koch excitedly recalled pulling
hominid bones from the ground at Johansen’s dig site in Olduvai Gorge.
He keeps a frame replica of Lucy’s hand as a trophy on his office wall,
and in2009 he funded the somewhat controversial Hall of Human Origins at the Smithsonian to the tune of $15 million.